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A SPARC of Light in the Fiscal Gloom

Just as many people rely on cereals as a dietary staple, many professors and students rely on serials as grist for their scholarly mills. If you think corn flakes have gotten more expensive, consider that while the consumer price index rose 52 percent from 1986 to 1998, the average serial (specialized journals) price rose a budget-busting 207 percent. In 2001, the average subscription cost is $335, ranging from around $60 in the humanities, to $355 in psychology, to nearly $1,500 in chemistry and physics. Yes, per year.

Serial price inflation is driven by several factors, including an increase in faculty publication rates and the proliferation of journals for specialized subdisciplines and interdisciplinary studies. More journals for smaller audiences, steady-state or declining library acquisitions budgets, subsequent cancellations, and, frankly, the greed of a few near-monopolistic major science publishers have created an inflationary spiral, and something has to give. Periodical expenditures in the entire CSU system have remained fairly constant since 1986, while the number of periodical subscriptions has dropped from more than 65,000 to fewer than 47,000. Meanwhile, the number of CSU campuses and students and their appetite for serials have increased.

The academy has responded in three ways: by canceling subscriptions and becoming more reliant on interlibrary loan and document delivery services, by purchasing serial full-text/index databases at reduced costs through consortiums, and by saying, “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!”

Inflammatory words are obviously not enough, but lately we have felt a little SPARC that might just catch fire. “Returning Science to Scientists” is the goal of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. According to their Web site (http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=a0), “SPARC … facilitates the use of technology to expand access, and partners with publishers that bring top-quality, low-cost research to a greater audience.” SPARC was created by the Association of Research Libraries and currently has 180 institutional members, including the UC system, but not the CSU.

SPARC has cooperated with commercial publishers and scholarly societies to create more than 20 alternative scientific journals at reasonable prices. In a scholarly equivalent of the Boston Tea Party, 40 editorial members of the Machine Learning Journal have resigned in protest over that publication’s policies and costs and thrown their support to the SPARC-created Journal of Machine Learning Research. Is this merely an isolated event, or might it be the first ripple of a rising tide?

P.S.: The request line is open. Although I have some ideas for future columns, I’d like to know what issues or trends in libraries and research interest you the most. Send your suggestions to jrdwyer@csuchico.edu.

Jim Dwyer, Library Collection Management